The Best American Travel Writing 2012

By Jason Wilson

The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.

The Best American Travel Writing 2012 includes

Bryan Curtis, Lynn Freed, J. Malcolm Garcia, Peter Gwin,
Pico Iyer, Mark Jenkins, Dimiter Kenarov, Robin Kirk,
Kimberly Meyer, Paul Theroux, and others

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9780547809137

Jason Wilson

Jason Wilson is the director of the Cave of Adullam Transformational Training Academy and the author of Cry Like a Man and Battle Cry. He received the President's Volunteer Service Award from President Obama and acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne executive produced an award-winning ESPN Films documentary about Jason's transformative work with boys, titled The Cave of Adullam. Jason has over twenty-seven years of martial arts experience and more than seventeen years dedicated to the development of African American males. He is a man of the Most High, a faithful husband for over twenty-five years, and a devoted father of two beautiful children.

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Copyright © 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2012 by William T. Vollmann

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Travel Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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www.hmhbooks.com

ISSN 1530-1516

ISBN 978-0-547-80897-0

eISBN 978-0-547-80913-7

v1.1012

The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame by Bryan Curtis. First published in Grantland, September 20, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Curtis. Reprinted by permission of Bryan Curtis.

Railroad Semantics by Aaron Dactyl. First published in Railroad Semantics #5. Copyright © 2011 by Aaron Dactyl. Reprinted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.

Walking the Border by Luke Dittrich. First published in Esquire, May 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Luke Dittrich. Reprinted by permission of Luke Dittrich.

Keeping Watch by Lynn Freed. First published in Harper’s, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Lynn Freed. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Endeavor.

Now Ye Know Who the Bosses Are Here Now by J. Malcolm Garcia. First published in McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2011 by J. Malcolm Garcia. Reprinted by permission of J. Malcolm Garcia.

Letter from Paris by Michael Gorra. First published in the Hudson Review, Vol. LXIV, No. 2 (Summer 2011). Copyright © 2011 by The Hudson Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Hudson Review.

The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu by Peter Gwin. First published in National Geographic, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Society.

Maximum India by Pico Iyer. First published in Condé Nast Traveler, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Pico Iyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Amundsen Schlepped Here by Mark Jenkins. First published in Outside, October 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Mark Jenkins. Reprinted by permission of Mark Jenkins.

Conquering an Infinite Cave by Mark Jenkins. First published in National Geographic, January 2011. Copyright © 2011 by National Geographic Society. Reprinted by permission of National Geographic Society.

Memento Mori by Dimiter Kenarov. First published in The Believer. Copyright © 2011 by Dimiter Kenarov. Reprinted by permission of Dimiter Kenarov.

The American Scholar by Robin Kirk. First published in City of Walls, Autumn 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Robin Kirk. Reprinted by permission of Robin Kirk.

Holy City of the Wichitas by Kimberly Meyer. First published in Ecotone 11. Copyright © 2011 by Kimberly Meyer. Reprinted by permission of Kimberly Meyer.

How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer by Monte Reel. First published in The Believer, Vol. 84, October 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Monte Reel. Reprinted by permission of Monte Reel.

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden by Henry Shukman. First published in Outside, February 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Henry Shukman. Reprinted by permission of Henry Shukman.

My Days with the Anti-Mafia by Thomas Swick. First published in the Missouri Review, Winter 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Swick. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Swick.

The Wicked Coast by Paul Theroux. First published in the Atlantic, June 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

The Reckoning by Kenan Trebincevic. First published in the New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

Garbage City by Elliott D. Woods. First published in VQR, Spring 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Elliott D. Woods. Reprinted by permission of Elliott D. Woods.

Foreword

WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, we seem to reach another strange milestone in the evolution of travel. I have been seized by this thought each year during the process of putting together another edition of this anthology, and it never ceases to amaze me how much travel has changed since we began publishing The Best American Travel Writing in 1999.

This past year it struck me as I was browsing the App Store, downloading English-Spanish editions of popular voice-activated translator apps for my iPhone and iPad. I was doing this at the behest of an editor, who had asked me to test out these apps during a trip to Spain.

Since I was genuinely embarrassed at how badly my Spanish had deteriorated over the years, I was hopeful that the trio of apps I was downloading—Google Translate, SpeechTrans, and Jibbigo—might work better than the reviews suggested. I briefly considered a fourth, iLingual—one in which you take a photo of your mouth and then hold the iPhone or iPod Touch up to your face while the screen animates your lips in the foreign language. Thankfully, for my dignity’s sake, I couldn’t find iLingual for Spanish, only in French, German, and Arabic.

Eating breakfast at my kitchen table a few days before departure, I gave Jibbigo—the speech-to-speech translator that seemed the most user-friendly on the iPad—a test spin.

I’m eating French toast, I said slowly, trying to be clear.

I need in French toast is what Jibbigo transcribed on its screen, which then spoke in a sultry female voice: Necesito francés en tostada.

I shushed my kids, who were watching cartoons, and turned down the TV—I’d read that background noise really threw speech-to-speech translators off. Once it was silent, I again pushed the red Record button on the screen. I am eating French toast, I said, even more slowly and with as much enunciation as I could muster.

All right and even French toast, Jibbigo transcribed on its screen. Está bien incluso y pan tostado francés, said Sultry Voice.

Noooo! Now my kids began laughing at me and Jibbigo.

One of my sons grabbed the iPad. Mom, are you cutting pears in the kitchen? he said through the app to his mother, who was indeed cutting pears in the kitchen. Are you hiding Harrods in the kitchen? wrote Jibbigo, which Sultry Voice dutifully said in a bizarre game of mistranslation-down-the-lane.

By then my kids were hysterical. I grabbed the iPad back, pressed the red button, and shouted, Go get dressed and ready for school!

Do you just ready for school? translated Jibbigo. Solo la lista para la escuela? said the voice. Ahhhhhh!

Needless to say, I was not particularly optimistic about the utility of a speech-to-speech translator during my journeys through the wine regions of Ribera del Duero and Toro. But I was determined to give it a try.

My first chance to use the app—once I’d gotten off the plane and through customs with a mere Buenos dias—was at the rental car counter. As I approached it, I spoke slowly to Jibbigo. I have reserved a rental car for Mr. Wilson, I said.

I have reserved a rental car for Mr. Wilson, transcribed Jibbigo. "He reservado un coche de alquiler para el Señor Wilson," purred the sultry voice.

Okay! I thought. Here we go! Maybe I’d misjudged Jibbigo. Maybe this was all going to work out fine! Reaching the counter, I hit play.    Yeah, we have that reservation, said the young woman behind the counter. In English. She raised an eyebrow at me. And no worries, sir. I speak English at a high level.

In fact, in most interactions with tourist-service people—hotel clerks, taxi drivers, cashiers—a speech-to-speech translator was very unnecessary. Basic, polite high school Spanish worked just fine. Jibbigo usually just complicated matters.

In a crowded, noisy café I asked Jibbigo, May I have a café con leche? and Jibbigo responded with May I have a tactical mentioned? To which Sultry Voice said, Puede darme un tactical mencionado? Of course, I’d accidentally thrown off Jibbigo by not saying coffee with milk.

So I simply said, Café con leche, por favor, to the guy behind the counter—and it all worked out fine.

At one point, driving through a toll plaza, I figured I’d use the translator to ask the toll-taker whether I was going the right way. I pulled out the iPad and said, Is this the right road for Valladolid? Jibbigo transcribed, Is this the right road for liability? and Sultry Voice said, Es este el camino correcto para el obligatorio?

The toll-taker looked at me like I was nuts. So instead I did what many Americans do in a foreign country—I pointed wildly ahead and said, loudly, Valladolid!?

Si, si. Claro, the toll-taker said.

Again I knew I’d complicated matters by saying the name of the city rather than just Is this the correct road? But honestly, it’s not easy to remember Jibbigo’s limitations when you’re holding up a line of traffic.

This is not to say that all my interactions with translation apps were unsuccessful. In a tapas bar in León, I used Google Translate to help with a nice, informative conversation with the bartender about the Prieto Picudo wines of the region. The bar was so noisy—with Barcelona’s league-title-clinching game blaring on the TV—that Jibbigo or SpeechTrans would have been useless.

With Google Translate, I kept surreptitiously tapping my questions and conversation cues into the iPod Touch as the guy poured another customer’s drink. It simply looked as if I were perhaps texting friends at another bar. When the barman returned, I had my queries all mapped out in my head.

I did this in a couple of other situations too, and what I realized is that because I already have some competency in Italian, I often knew more Spanish words than I thought. The translation apps helped me fill in the blanks and formulate more coherent sentences. Still, I’m not sure how much they’d help a complete beginner with only Sesame Street Spanish.

In the end, there was one situation, a casual dinner-party scenario, in which Jibbigo was relatively useful—and enlightening. I was drinking wine in an ancient wine cellar near Toro, Spain, with a young organic winemaker named Maria. She makes a lovely Toro wine called Volvoreta, which means butterfly (and which Jibbigo translated as Buddha actor).

We sat at a stone table with her father and some family friends, few of whom spoke English. Maria spoke English pretty well and translated, but occasionally we got bogged down by a phrase or a concept.

For instance, they talked for ten minutes about AYN-stain, and I failed to realize that they meant Albert Einstein until someone typed his name into the translator app on my iPad. At one point we got stuck on the word musa. Maria is charming and attractive in a Dionysian earth-goddess sort of way, and someone at the table was suggesting that she was a musa to wine writers. Jibbigo clarified that they were suggesting that Maria was a muse.

Maria pointed to a review of her wine in an American wine magazine. After using all the usual descriptors of fruits and aromas and mouthfeel, the critic had referred to her wine as classy.

Classy? she asked. Tell me what this word means, classy.

Wine is nearly impossible to explain in your native tongue, let alone one you’re not proficient in. Well, I said, fumbling around in my native language, "classy is kind of a difficult word to translate. There are several different meanings. You sort of have to know who’s using it."

Classy is slightly old-fashioned, and these days can be literal or ironic and mean anything from elegant or stylish to Ron Burgundy’s sign-off in Anchorman (Stay classy, San Diego) to the kind of snarky thing you say to a friend who, say, takes a swig straight from the wine bottle. Wine critics aren’t generally known as ironists, but they still are fairly precise in their adjectives—so the choice of classy instead of elegant or stylish meant something.

As I tried to explain the nuance to Maria, one of the friends, slightly impatient, said, "Elegante. It means elegante."

Well, sort of, I said.

Try your iPad, Maria said.

Classy, I said into Jibbigo.

Elegante, said Sultry Voice.

Everyone had a nice laugh at the silly American journalist with the iPad who was trying to complicate everything. Which was a good thing. After all, it was good to be reminded that some ideas, some concepts will never be easily translatable. Sure, people are always inventing new gadgets to make travel easier. And every day it gets easier to reach out and to connect with people of different cultures. But even with the advent of new technologies, it’s important to remember that it’s still possible to miscommunicate, to get confused, and to become lost. That’s the thing about travel—perhaps the essential thing, the thing that teaches us the most—that never changes. And that thing is what this anthology delivers once again this year.

The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2011 were forwarded to William Vollmann, who made our final selections.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2012. I am once again asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2012 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2013, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.

Further, publications that want to make certain their contributions will be considered for the next edition should make sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Drexel University, 3210 Cherry Street, 2nd floor, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

It was a thrill and an honor to work on this edition with William Vollmann, whose adventurous work I’ve always admired. I am also grateful to Nicole Angeloro and Jesse Smith for their help on this, our thirteenth edition of The Best American Travel Writing.

JASON WILSON

Introduction

OF THE GLADDEST MOMENTS in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Thus Sir Richard Burton, who knew whereof he spoke. I myself have always been a partisan of that point of view, although Emerson’s travel is a fool’s paradise gratifies me just as much. To set out for someplace far away or strange is to take an active part in that baffling journey of ours through life into death; to stay home and improve one’s self-knowledge (perhaps through armchair traveling) is to do the same; both men were right.

My friend Steve Jones, with whom I hop freight trains now and then, eagerly reads this anthology every year. I asked him what he likes best about it, and he said: I like the variety of the places the writers are going and how odd those places can be, and also the writing style. I like the fact that some pieces are somber and some are just quirky and there are usually a couple of hilarious ones thrown in. During my selection of essays (from sixty-odd finalists, among whom I discovered both the editor of this series and myself; these of course were rejected immediately to avoid any conflict of interest), I tried to consider what might please Steve, in hopes of pleasing you.

Monte Reel’s How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer, which I have chosen to open this volume, introduces us to the Victorian-era travel guides, which he calls lovingly compiled tip sheets on the acquired art of paying attention. The epigram from Burton appears in his essay. Emerson also gets his due here, because Reel applies the Victorians to that peculiarly unknown land, the local Sprawlsville. Instead of being a vacuous purgatory that deserved pity, the mall grew in complexity with each stride. The point that the how-to-explore books collectively hammered home is this: if you sincerely investigate it, every detail hides reason, and any environment is far more sophisticated than our senses appreciate.

Sincere investigation demands an exposition without constraints. When someone asks an author how long his work in progress will run, the best answer is As long as it takes to say what I need to say, and no longer or shorter. Victorian adventurers, of course, most often traveled on their own capital. What Marx called the cash nexus now taints the production of most professional travelers. Essays in mainstream periodicals are vulnerable to several types of commercial damage. First of all, the editorial department, not the writer, sets the word count, which relates to the subject and the writer’s nature only accidentally. Second, the draft received passes through any number of hands, whose cuttings and pastings need not be in concert. It is not only a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, but also of nobody knowing who has added how much salt. Third, the number of advertisements slated for a given issue goes far in determining how fat it can be. Thus after an essay has been hacked down to meet a given word count, it may be mutilated again, or even expanded. I have occasionally had something excised from an article of mine, only to be asked at the very end, by someone who never saw the original, to add just that, but in a different part of the essay, since the place where it once lived is long gone. These bemusing vicissitudes of the freelancer’s circumstances render the treasures brought home from the voyage—that is, the details, and their causes and meanings—subject to vandalism. Hence the acquired art of paying attention is best served outside the marketplace—either by travelers of independent means, such as Richard Burton, or by travelers who control their own means of production, such as the daring train-hopper Aaron Dactyl, a portion of whose self-published magazine appears last in this book. Most of us do sell ourselves, and our work as published by the magazines shows the consequences. My feelings about this are well described by one of Timbuktu’s historians: In my worst dreams, I see a rare text that I haven’t read being slowly eaten. He, of course, is referring to bugs, not editors. You will meet him in Peter Gwin’s The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu, which is perhaps the most traditionally Victorian of this year’s travel essays: carefully drawn, rich in anecdotes and observations, complete with romance (of a sad sort) and danger, and set in a locale that we might now call Orthodox Exotic.

To the Victorians, Africa was still the Dark Continent and much of the planet remained unmapped. Nowadays we have gained the semblance of an acquaintance with most of it (excluding the oceans). But insightful travelers perpetually discover the gloriously and ominously unknown darkness of everywhere. When Henry Shukman visits the forbidden country around Chernobyl, he finds an astonishingly rapid alteration into something resembling the Zone in that Tarkovsky movie Stalker. Gray wolves and wild boar now roam a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium. Here too are albino birds, red-needled pine trees, and field mice that might be growing resistant to radiation. What if someday the science required to save us from our inevitable new atomic errors comes out of this place? Or what if Chernobyl proves that moderate nuclear accidents are worse than we can imagine?

A natural companion to Shukman’s essay, Elliott D. Woods’s praiseworthy exposition of trash ecology—a topic that is getting ever more attention nowadays—brings us to the outskirts of Cairo, where a haze produced by the exhalations of some 2,500 black-market recycling workshops carpets a landscape of windowless brick high-rises and unpaved alleys piled high with garbage. The people who live and glean here are called zabaleen. It is unexpected—and heartening—to learn that in sixty years, the zabaleen have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, they lack many rights. As a measure against swine flu, and perhaps to appease Muslims whipped into a frenzy by the H1N1 scare, the Egyptian government recently killed 300,000 garbage-eating pigs belonging to the zabaleen. All the same, Woods’s observations give cause for thought and hope combined. It seems to me that if governments and NGOs were to take note of this essay and encourage appropriate local manifestations of the profit motive to address this problem, then perhaps our future need not involve Soylent Green.

Thomas Swick’s account of the group called Addiopizzo, which encourages business establishments not to pay Mafia extortionists, is equally worth reading, because it introduces us to brave people who stand up to evil. That Addiopizzo is necessary in an EU country in this day and age is rather shocking; that it may prove effective would be a still greater surprise. I was very impressed that thirty-five hundred of Palermo’s citizens summoned the courage to put themselves on public record that they gave their business to extortion-free bars, restaurants, and the like. At the site where gangsters murdered a man named Paolo Borsellino, a note quotes the victim: The fight against the Mafia should be a cultural and moral movement that involves everyone, especially the younger generation.

A traveler’s experience is necessarily narrow, unique, suggestive at best but never definitive. It is up to us as readers to judge the situations described. What need the Mafia fills today for anyone but its own members remains unknown to us. Very likely Swick could not have interviewed Addiopizzo and the Mafia on the same ticket. His glancing illumination of this subject, like most any one person’s, is necessary but not sufficient. In this anthology we are fortunate enough to have two points of view on the situation of Northern Ireland. I have paired Robin Kirk’s grim snapshot of Belfast, which is well worth reading for its own close observation and analysis (what is disturbing about segregation in Northern Ireland is not that there are tradeoffs; it’s that the people entrench themselves in segregated communities, and many of their leaders help them do it), with J. Malcolm Garcia’s brave and heartrending investigation into a young man’s murder in a small village in this region. In its fidelity to local speech patterns, elimination of the superfluous, and painstaking arrangement of vignettes, Garcia’s piece is not only journalism but literature.

While we are on the subject of literary excellence, this seems the place to mention Paul Theroux’s lovely vignette of the Maine coast, which draws no less on his historical and literary knowledge than on his accomplished eye, and Michael Gorra’s letter from Paris, which rounds out this next plausible pair. The latter ends with the happy Emersonianism of the author and his daughter watching old American movies in the Rue des Écoles, sitting at home only and precisely because we are also abroad. Both of these offer us the appearance of an organic and intrinsic brevity. Hence they seem undamaged by copy editors’ deletions. Both are a pleasure to read in and of themselves.

Another very short piece is Kenan Trebincevic’s carefully understated parable of a return to Bosnia, and of an encounter with a neighbor who extorted property from his mother during the war. Anyone who has reflected at all on Yugoslavia’s civil war can well imagine the horrors that Trebincevic leaves out. The story he tells is simple, affecting, hideous.

Meanwhile, Bryan Curtis’s visit to the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame seized mordant hold of me: We miss the gringos, man . . . They all left, like the Mayas did. I never could have imagined that comparison. It is funny, eerie, and true. Curtis alludes to the bodybuilder Beatriz de Regíl González, who in her bio is compared to a beautiful flower in Tijuana’s garden, and I longed to see her portrait, so that I would know how beautiful she was. Eighty years ago, writes Curtis, Old Tijuana had a bell tower. It was built to convince Americans they were experiencing European luxury. Now we’re standing in a copy of that tower—a Xerox of a dream of Europe . . . Finally, this belltower plays a fake bell. Were I an editorial magnate, I’d invite this writer to spend a year in Tijuana and write down a million crazy details.

Kimberly Meyer’s prior residence in Oklahoma eventually led her to the Holy City of the Wichitas, which she describes at greater length and with less cynical bemusement than Curtis does Tijuana. We do use a donkey and a live baby Jesus, explains an exponent of the passion play. We’ve never had to use a doll. What the reader makes of this is up to him. Perhaps the bell tower in Tijuana will come to mind. Or perhaps it will ring significant as an emblem of strict and praiseworthy sincerity. Meyer makes her own point of view gently clear, without telling us what to think.

Dimiter Kenarov’s beautifully written essay about Bulgaria’s street necrologues (which likewise decorate the street walls and lampposts of Serbia) pays respect to such absurdities as this farewell to the renowned Georgi Dimitrov: We promise to guard like the pupils of our eyes our maritime border for the successful building of socialism in our beloved Motherland. Here we could almost be in Tijuana’s fake bell tower. Kenarov remarks that the eternal border between the upper world and the underworld, the city and the cemetery, has disappeared in Bulgaria. No one is truly dead without a necrologue, and yet necrologues are meant to keep the dead alive. So it is with Burton and Emerson, Dark Continents and Chernobyl. (As Pink Floyd said: Matter of fact, it’s all dark.) This ambiguity, or whatever you want to call it, shines out at us in Pico Iyer’s account of Varanasi, where Shiva met Vishnu—what could be more emblematic than that? Hence the Ganges with its thirty sewers: Bathe yourself in its filthy waters . . . and you purify yourself for life. Wandering among sadhus who want to live in a world of ash, Iyer concludes: Spirituality in Varanasi lies precisely in the poverty and sickness and death that it weaves into its unending tapestry; a place of holiness, it says, is . . . a place where purity and filth, anarchy and ritual, unquenchable vitality and the constant imminence of death all flow together. Here too he experiences a turning-backward epiphany not unlike that of Gorra in the Parisian repertory theater: Varanasi comes to remind him of his twisting-laned birthplace, Oxford.

Reviews for The Best American Travel Writing 2012

[don1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book and have enjoyed other books in this series which are published annually. There are 25 or so stories by different authors about experiences around the world. They are not all simple stories of, say, someone's week in Paris or Rome. A story might be, for example, from a war correspondent in Afghanistan. Every year someone different chooses the final selections to be published so the books are always quite different.